Gießen 2024 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 7: Astroparticle Physics I

HK 7.4: Talk

Monday, March 11, 2024, 18:00–18:15, HBR 19: C 103

Progress of the Neutron Decay Facility PERC and its Silicon Detector — •Manuel Lebert for the PERC collaboration — Physik-Department, Technische Universität München, Germany — Forschungs-Neutronenquelle Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, Garching, Germany

The PERC facility is currently under construction at the FRM II in Garching, Germany. It will serve as an intense and clean source of electrons and protons from neutron beta decay for precision studies. It aims to improve the measurements of the properties of weak interaction by one order of magnitude and to search for new physics via new effective couplings.

PERC's central component is a 12 m long superconducting magnet system. It hosts an 8 m long decay region with a uniform field. To minimize systematic uncertainties, an additional high-field region selects the phase space of electrons and protons that can reach the main detector.

The main detector and two backscattering detectors will initially be scintillation detectors with a (silicon) photomultiplier readout. In a later upgrade, the downstream detector will be replaced by a pixelated silicon PIN-detector with a thickness of 2mm. In this talk, I present the status of the ongoing installation of PERC and its infrastructure, which is expected to be ready for neutrons by the end of 2024, as well as first results of the characterization of the silicon detector.

Keywords: silicon detector; beta-decay; weak interaction; cold neutrons; spectroscopy